When Will the DAC Singularity Be Reached?

@thyname

yep our resident sicko is back yet again, with another lame username and same fake comments fake points of view fake persona...

like the sad shut-in teenage misfit going onto the porsche forums talking about how he once drove a bugatti veyron at sonoma raceway... only in his (wet) dreams!!!

sheesh

I know that my comment will fall on tone deaf ears but I find all of these arguments self serving and gibberish. I became an “audiophile” in 1966 when in Vietnam and bought  Sony reel to reel with both detachable lid and sidemounted speakers. Wow. It beat the hell out my portable radio. Peter, Paul and Mary were awesome and Uncle Bob couldn’t sing a lick but wrote great stuff, somebody in our basecamp had  a similar tape recorder but added some Pioneer full range speakers. Off to the PX and massive improvement till someone added receiver for more power. Holy Mackerel. I had to get me one of those. So I did. I rotated back to the states before getting a turntable but the scarcity of prerecorded tapes made a Gerrard necessary.I upgraded for more power, auto reverse and turntable vs changers, but the constant was ANALOG. I hated clicks and pops and tape hiss but the music was not an issue. It was great. Now I have pay thousands of dollars to try to recapture the analog era that we lost to bandwidth. Tape deck $200. Pioneer speakers $115 each. Sansui receiver $125. Gerrard changer $119. Less than $700 for a mid quality analog system that my fellow soldiers coveted. How much is a good DAC? No wonder 50 year old stuff is so popular!

Actually, that $700 outlay for a decent stereo would be much more today.

$700 in 1966 is equivalent in purchasing power to about $6,570.65 today, an increase of $5,870.65 over 57 years. The dollar had an average inflation rate of 4.01% per year between 1966 and today, producing a cumulative price increase of 838.66%.

All said, that amount would get you a mighty fine system today.

All the best,
Nonoise

My Emotiva DAC for $300 in 2011 was modified with 5 $47 Sparkos regulators, high quality Panasonic power caps, film caps, etc. and a Synergistic Research purple fuse. The unit comes with a fully discrete audio board without Op-Amps. The result is $20K sounding DAC on the cheap. It also operates flawlessly, stand-by mode, digital close matched attenuation, nice heavy/quality remote (why is it that so much higher end gear have junky feeling plastic remotes) and light dimming display. Nothing missing in operation and sonically a window to the digital master whatever the engineer did. It is an equivalent but different sound than my analog set up. I’ve heard many under $20K DACs and very few expensive ($5K+) CD players. I don’t know if a CD player for less is as good as separates can be.

I'm sure that better DACs exist with more modern chips, clocks, etc. but basically, they need to sound musically involving and have great resolution, not leaving anything musically important out.  I've achieved that on the cheap and I tried $9K DACs also superbly constructed/art works but lacking in musicality (electronics design failed due to a noise laden conversion algorithm).